Sir John Charles Rowell Fieldsend KBE, QC (13 September 1921 – 22 February 2017) was a judge who served as the first Chief Justice of Zimbabwe.
During the Second World War, he was commissioned into the Royal Artillery in 1943, serving in Egypt, Italy (where he fought at Monte Cassino) and Greece.
After demobilisation, Fieldsend was called to the Southern Rhodesian bar in 1947 and entered private practice, becoming a Queen's Counsel (QC) in 1959.
In 1965, as a member of the Appellate Division of the High Court, he was the sole dissenter in Madzimbamuto v Lardner-Burke, a challenge to the legality of Southern Rhodesia's Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) earlier that year.
In 1968, Justice Fieldsend resigned from the bench after the High Court dismissed the applications for stays of execution by three black Rhodesians convicted of murder and terrorist offences before UDI, stating that his continuation in office "amounts to accepting the abandonment of the 1961 Constitution".